What % of the population has latent sub-4:00 talent?

1/40 is probably an over-estimation like you said, but I don't think it's as rare as people think. Running is a discipline that takes years and years to realize one's potential and many who start do not have the desire to continue. I would go so far as to say that kids who can run 4:2x in high school probably could break 4:00 if they had the luxury to continue training as a professional, optimizing everything.

I don't think some of those boys who beat you as a kid were necessarily more gifted. Kids mature at different rates and it's honestly unpredictable at such a young age. Late middle school/early high school is when things become less ambiguous.

You can take a 4:15 talent to sub 4 with a ton of EPO and putting on a pair of pogo spikes

0.03%(1.2M) of the global male population have the genetic talent to run sub 4 at this time.

1 million high schoolers participate in track yearly. Most distance runners are in track. LeBron James and Tom Brady would not have been milers. There have been about 20 high school kids break 4 out of the tens of millions who have tried. That's less than 1 in 1 million. Let's double it for the random soccer player who could have done it.

The genetic talent to run 4 minutes is rare...

But there are reasons that it doesn't get discovered more often.

I'd bet there are more genetically predisposed 4 minute milers who never take up running compared to say 6'10" males who never take up basketball...

With the basketball player... a huge genetic marker is on display by just looking at them. Running talent genetics are way more subtle.

I was a very large guy for a distance runner (6'2" 185 lbs). I had a 6.1 liter VO2 max (right around 74.5-75 ml/kg. Mid 14s for 5K.

I was also an exercise physiology student at Arizona at that time. One of our profs had gone to the University of Washington and he saw my lab results and said that those results were world class level for crew (in the 1980s) especially if I got a little bigger. But I never had an opportunity to try it.

Related question: if when you turned 40, you were given the option of having some spirit or entity reveal to you all your athletic potential in every sport, now that it’s essentially too late to pursue it to the max, would you want to know? Like, you might hear how fast you could have been had you done more; would it kill you to know you had Olympic potential or pro contract potential you never realized? Or perhaps that you could have gone pro in something you never had a chance to try? I’m not sure I’d want to know. As an aging runner almost 40 myself, I took up Nordic skiing and it came naturally, trouble was I grew up in the south. The state I live in now has skiing as a high school sport. I’d probably frustrate me if the spirit said I had high level potential in skiing that I never found because I lived in a warm state when young.

With super shoes? 80%
Without: .5%

From my experience in teaching for over 30 years there is an abundance of talented young people who just need to find the right sport. The last school I taught at has had a former student win the Green Jersey of the Tour De France, another female run 1:57 for 800 and another female who has run 31:37 for 10k and place 22nd at the 2023 WXC champs. They all went to the same school within a 6 year period.

As far as the 4 minute mile I have had one of my juniors progress to 3:56 running at an Ivy league school but did I know that when he was age 11 he would run sub 4? No. I did know that I had a talented kid when he ran 4:04 for 1500 at 1500. In the city I live in there is currently a 3:49 miler, a 3:50 miler and probably 6-8 others who at some point have broken 4.

You need still huge genetic gifts to run sub 4 but unsure of what % of the population would have that talent. The key though is have a good training group within a great environment and a coach that knows how to develop that talent.

Based off of my personal experience, and anecdotal evidence while looking at runners who started in early middle school or before, I'd say with perfect training 1/100 or so people can do it.

More than that look at college runners. Best of the best HS kids put in another 4 years and only a small fraction break 4.

Or look at your high school and count how many sub 4 kids they have generated over the past 20 years.

there is definitely a lot of talent that doesn’t get developed. But I am guessing it is closer to 1:10000 type stuff. Seems like a big number but we are still talking thousands of guys.

Total gut--in a world where everyone runs, and they all get really training and don't need to sweat having a day job or not having enough resources, and are motivated and get regular good racing opportunities? One out of 400-500 males has sub-4 potential before they start to decline. In a world where everyone runs, but everything else is the same as today? One out of 4,000-5,000.

Bit difficult to extrapolate from what guys do as juniors. Look at how most of kids run, and look at how most of adults run. Few maintain that running style because bodies change, mmore so in females. You would have a higher proportion of potentials as junior, but a much lower outcome.

Much rarer than is expressed here imo

LRC has this weird idea that people that would make elite runners usually end up in other sports. This mostly comes from the belief that everyone is like them or better and that getting elite level fast is just a matter of wanting to do the training. It is part self selection bias and part dismissal of talent requirements to be an elite runner. If you think it is just hard work you don’t have to contend with the prospect that you were born on third base. If you weren’t born on third base anyone can do it and it is easy.

This is just not true. The attributes that make a top runner are very specific to running. An elite runners build is not conducive to other sports. The amount of “untapped” talent is much lower than posters here think.

Nowadays our number of high school sub 4 milers in the US is about 1 in a million. Even if everyone had pro training up until the age of 30, it’s hard to envision the rate ever being better than 1 in 100,000.

it's a fake question. no one has sub 4 ability out of a box. ergo the fraction managing it on talent + work = roughly those capable of it at all.

Noted.

I think life circumstance plays as much of a role as raw talent. As distance running becomes a more respected sport and thus draws more talented athletes, and the physiology of what makes a great distance athlete and the training needed to do so becomes clearer we see more and more sub 4:00 milers emerge.

Im 22 and i’ve seen sub 4:00 go from a pro standard that was rare for college athletes and unheard of for highschool athletes to something that a handful of college athletes could do yearly and highschool athletes could occasionally do to 4:00 just about becoming the standard for “good” in college and a yearly requirement to be the best in a competitive state at the HS level.

I got to the level where I was almost smelling it in college, I had the prerequisite speed and some, could hang with competitive D1 XC guys, and ran a few workouts that would’ve been considered predictors. I think I could’ve been a pro miler instead of a pretty good 400/800 guy under different circumstances, I was overweight until I was 16, didn’t have visible abs until I was 18, and my training consisted of being a middle linebacker/tight end at a crappy highschool program from the age of 11 until I was 16. I guarantee you that was the cause of injury proneness and injuries to my body that probably left small residual dents in my running potential. By the end of my freshman year, I was worse than average on my mediocre XC team, I wanted to break 20:00 in the 5k by the end of highschool by the end of that year. By the end of senior year I was beating the whole team 400m-5k and was the 4th distance boy in team history to end up on a college roster. The 3rd kid has a Nike contract and has worn a team USA singlet. He set the school 3200m record his freshman year. If I grew up with the Ingebrigsten treatment, I’m not saying i’d be a worldbeater by any means but I think you’d know my name. Imagine if I started highschool in 17:00 5k shape and ran for a good program instead of 30:00 at a program where a sub 17:00 effort puts you on the top 10 list. My childhood life choices and circumstance crushed my potential and I didn’t even realize it.

That being said, when I was a kid, I would win the mile or mile and a half at school despite jiggling while doing it. I would go running with my neighborhood run club that mostly consisted of adults 1-2 times a month and beat all of them but my dad (run club where everyone competed against eachother every run instead of running together), I would nuke my whole football team on conditioning days and not understand why they were all moaning and puking after 100yd sprints or ladders. After I left the team for running the team speed demon who was known statewide for superior speed got beat by me in a 200m during track season and I did a standing start. I did a half marathon off of 3-4 weeks of actual training earlier this summer and beat a field of 800ish people by over a minute. Many people who have been training for this specific race for months, consistent miles and a consistent diet. I could outlift anyone on my highschool track team during highschool let alone the distance kids.

All of this to say that many people would shock themselves if they explored their full potential, but you do need a special kind of talent to be a sub 4:00 miler. I haven’t broken 4:00 and I don’t know if it’s even in the cards for me and in the least narcissistic way possible I believe I have more talent for running a few laps around the track than over 99% of people. That being said I think that there are thousands of people in the US let alone the world that possess as much talent as I do and they are doing water polo or fortnite or making music or something and haven’t and never will run a mile under 5:00 let alone 4:00.

New Zealand has over 10x as many sub-4 milers relative to their population as the US. (I computed this stat before the supershoe era, so it could be different now.) But the number of potential sub-4 milers is least 10x the actual number and probably a lot more than that.

lol. OP estimates 1 in 40 males have the potential to run sub-4:00 when only a few thousand have ever done it out of the estimate 50-60 billion who have ever lived. Because he got beat by a kid in PE. Sigh.

p.s. I ran 4:17 in high school and 4:06 in college.